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Fire Weather : A True Story from a Hotter World - Winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction - John Vaillant

Fire Weather

A True Story from a Hotter World - Winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction

By: John Vaillant

Hardcover | 10 August 2023 | Edition Number 1

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*WINNER of the BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION*

***AN INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER***

* A Pulitzer Prize Finalist * A National Book Award Finalist * A Writers' Trust Award Finalist *

'No book feels timelier than John Vaillant's Fire Weather . . . an adrenaline-soaked nightmare that is impossible to put down' Cal Flyn, The Times

'Superb and terrifying . . . it reads with pace and flair and a rich, furious clarity' Katherine Rundell, author of Super-Infinite

A gripping account of this century's most intense urban fire, and a panoramic exploration of the rapidly changing relationship between humanity and fire's fierce energy.

In May 2016, Fort McMurray, Alberta, the hub of Canada's oil industry, was overrun by wildfire. The multi-billion-dollar disaster turned entire neighbourhoods into firebombs and drove 90,000 people from their homes in a single afternoon. Through the story of this apocalyptic conflagration, John Vaillant explores the past and the future of our ever-hotter, more flammable world.

For hundreds of millennia, fire has been a partner in our evolution, shaping culture and civilization. Yet in our age of intensifying climate change, we are seeing its destructive power unleashed in ways never before witnessed by human beings. With masterly prose and cinematic style, Vaillant delves into the intertwined histories of the oil industry and climate science, the unprecedented devastation wrought by modern wildfires, and the lives forever changed by these disasters. Fire Weather is urgent reading for our new century of fire.

'A towering achievement; an immense work of research, reflection and imagination' Robert Macfarlane

'Astounding on every page. John Vaillant is one of the great poetic chroniclers of the natural world' David Wallace-Wells, author of The Uninhabitable Earth

'It reads like a thriller . . . I could not put it down' Andrea Wulf, author of The Invention of Nature
Industry Reviews
A towering achievement; an immense work of research, reflection and imagination . . . Fire Weather is extraordinary in terms of its scope and range; it also sings and surprises at the level of the sentence. It grips like a philosophical thriller, warns like a beacon, and shocks to the core

Riveting, spellbinding, astounding on every page. John Vaillant is one of the great poetic chroniclers of the natural world, and here he captures the majesty and horror of one of its great disasters - and what made it tragically possible

In John Vaillant's vivid anatomy of the apocalyptic Fort McMurray inferno, the histories of humankind's ever-accelerating consumption of fossil fuel, and of our ever-increasing vulnerability to extreme wildfire, converge with the relentlessness of fate - and the urgency of prophecy

Fire Weather is a compulsively readable journey into our fiery times - by turns a propulsive account of the Fort McMurray Fire burning an oil town to ash; an investigation into the gas-guzzling economic systems that make wildfires so hot they melt steel (and so large they form their own weather); and a meditation on the human relationship with combustion. At the centre, Vaillant gives us fire itself as a character - fast, hungry, and evolving to shape the warming decades to come

The Fort McMurray fire was a vortex of people, ideas, institutions, forest, oil, city, and wind, the quirky and the existential, all mutating under the wanton impress of the Anthropocene Age. Fire Weather offers a compelling account of that tragedy, and a reimagining of a pyric infection that threatens to remake the planet

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